Mai Mislang is no Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Why is everybody ganging up on Mai "wine sucks" Mislang? The poor girl was probably brought up by her parents, her school, her church, and the community she grew up in, to believe in honesty being the best policy.

Maybe the wine in Vietnam truly sucks, in which case Mai should be hailed as a paragon of virtue for refusing to be drawn into the "plastikan" of her president, who must have pretended to enjoy the wine, silly grin and all, even if it sucked.

Diplomacy, prudence, tact, and a host of other nice-sounding words are supposed to guide your conduct when you are a guest in a foreign country, against whom you must say no bad words. Oh yeah? Why don't you try telling that to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, instead of Mai Mislang.

The unshaven, squint-eyed Iranian leader once verbally sodomized America right in its academic heartland. But the most powerful country in the world is powerless to ig-nore the man. So during another invitation, Ahmadinejad verbally sodomized American again, right before the UN.

But Mai is no Ahmadinejad. She is just an obscure speechwriter for President Noynoy Aquino and is therefore obliged to hew closely to the official conduct that de-fines the character of this new government, no matter how pretentious and hypocritical that conduct may be.

Thus Mai made the mistake of concluding that if her president can make a specta-cle of himself eating hotdog on a New York sidewalk, thinking it sufficient to differenti-ate himself from the extravagance of his predecessor, what can be so harmful about a lit-tle Tweet on wine?

Oh sure, a Tweet can go around the world in an instant. But so what? Tweets stay personal even if made by officials. Only fools expect Tweets to contain votes on legisla-tive measures or Supreme Court decisions.

So, for a world that is getting increasingly jealous about personal choices and freedoms, I really cannot understand the mass freakout in the Philippines about a few personal observations made by a minor government functionary.

Still Mai can take heart, that in face of her betrayal by the nation she loves, she at least must have earned the respect and admiration of the world's wine connoisseurs, who cannot be bullied and harried by any need for tactfulness or diplomatic niceties.

If the wine sucks, it sucks. There can be no two ways about it. It will not be-come any sweeter by just keeping quiet about it. If the fact had to be made public, so be it. There are far greater matters of national interest to get all het up about than what peo-ple say in Tweets.

Besides, for a country that is rather quick to take offense at the slightest unflat-tering remark, like being called a country of maids, why can't we go a little soft on one of our own who finally managed to turn the tables around. Come on, let's go tweak and rile a few more countries.

In fact I loved it when Mai pushed the envelope. When she said there are no good-looking men in Vietnam, I can perfectly see why Noynoy would be seized with hor-ror. But for all the macho self-respecting Filipino males over here, Mai should find a new cult following.

And if she felt harassed by the motorcycle-driven traffic mess in Hanoi, at least she knows what she is talking about, being from a jeepney-harassed country such as ours, where it can get real tricky, especially if you have your head in the clouds, where there is no wang-wang.

I am admittedly a techno-phobe but I appreciate the fact that the new-found abil-ity of people to express themselves quickly is precisely the strength that drives new me-dia and is the reason why social networking sites are hugely popular. I don't Tweet. But if Mai can, who cares?